Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most visually demanding games available. Getting settings right means deciding where you want the tradeoffs — it is not possible to max everything on most hardware and maintain high frame rates.
The Core Decision: Ray Tracing vs Rasterization
This is the biggest fork in the road for Cyberpunk settings.
Without ray tracing — significantly higher frame rates. Lighting looks good but loses some global illumination accuracy. The right choice for anything below an RTX 4070 or RX 7900 XT.
With ray tracing (Overdrive/Path Tracing) — requires high-end hardware. RTX 4080/4090 or equivalent with DLSS Quality or Balanced. Transforms lighting in a visible way, particularly indoors and at night.
Recommended Settings Without Ray Tracing (Performance Build)
Texture Quality — High. VRAM permitting. Medium if you have under 6GB VRAM.
Field of View — 80–90. Default 78 feels slightly narrow.
Film Grain — Off. Personal preference but most people disable this.
Chromatic Aberration — Off. Softens the image unnecessarily.
Lens Flare — Off.
Motion Blur — Off for most players. The implementation in Cyberpunk is heavy.
Depth of Field — Off in gameplay, fine in cutscenes if you want it.
Screen Space Reflections — Medium. High has a significant performance cost.
Ambient Occlusion — SSAO or GTAO. GTAO looks better, SSAO is faster.
Volumetric Fog — Medium.
Crowd Density — High for immersion, Medium if frames are tight.
Shadow Quality — Medium. High/Ultra is expensive.
Cascaded Shadows Distance — Medium.
Upscaling
DLSS (Nvidia) — Quality mode at 1440p or 4K is the best balance. Performance mode recovers more frames at a resolution hit.
FSR 3 (AMD and Nvidia) — Quality mode. Less sharp than DLSS at equivalent settings but the frame generation in FSR 3 is effective.
XeSS — Good alternative on non-Intel hardware, roughly between DLSS and FSR in quality.
Ray Tracing / Path Tracing
If your GPU can handle it, enable ray tracing and use DLSS with Frame Generation on RTX 40 series. Path Tracing (Overdrive mode) requires DLSS Performance or Balanced on all but the highest-end GPUs.
Community Presets
For monitor calibration settings to go alongside your in-game settings — BestSettingsFor.com has community presets for hundreds of displays organized by Gaming, Media, and Work.
